For this post, I will be going through what I have learned across the last academic year about retouching images and what my images should look like in order to print and display them to a proffessional standard.

Firstly, let’s take a look at qn example of a before and after retouching:

The first image is the initial edit where I made the image black and white with some minor adjustments to the exposure and cropped slightly. It is clear that compared to the second version of the image, the exposure is still far too dark in comparison. The issue I had initially was that if I had increased the exposure any further, the highlights in the image would have been blown out while the darker areas would have been perfectly exposed. 

The way in which I fixed this issue was by using masks in  photoshop to pick out specific areas of the image and adjust them individually. This allowed me to preserve the highlights as they were whilst bringing more light to the darker areas of the images suchas the fur.

The Editing Process.

Now I will take you through the process of how I retouch my images step by step.

Firstly, I make minor adjustents to the overall exposure of the image so I can see a better where I need to start masking.

Now that I have a clearer picture as to which areas still need brightening up, I begin masking. With the method I use, I begin by selecting the quick mask tool (The square with a circle in the middle). You can also press Q as a shortcut.

Now that I have the quick mask tool enabled, I select the brush tool and begin brushing the areas that I want to brighten.

Now that the area I want to mask is marked, I once again select the quick mask tool. Now the icon goes from filled in to now just an outline with a dotted circle inside. Once again you can press Q for a shortcut to this. Now that this is enabled, the red area that has been masked will become a selection. 

Now that I have a selection, I need to right click and ‘select inverse’ as the selection made will automatically select everything but the area that has been painted in red. I could have painted the inverse in red initially but in my experience, doing it this way saves time as I have less area of the image to paint over.

Now that the area I want to expose more has been selected, I can use the exposure tool to edit this part of the image seperate to the rest. 

Just so that it is clear as to what I have changed, here is a before and after of the origional image and the edit in progress.

Of course this is still far from the outcome of the image at the beginning of this post but essentially from this point all that is needed is to repeat this process for all the areas of the image that are under exposed. 

Final Word.

I hope this gave some insight into how I edit and retouch my images. It is a simple process when you get to grips with it but it can be extremely effective at improving images in an overall sense. Furthermore, It can really help save those underexposed images that we sometimes deem to be unsaveable. A few images that I thought were lost were included in my book after using this editing process which attests to the effectiveness of it.

As I said, this is how I edit my images. This post was to give insight into that but to also possibly help others, I hope I was able to do that.